Nokia 9300 smart phone


23 Jun 2005

Product: smart phone
Price: €499 on contract and €699 SIM-free
I was initially wary of reviewing the Nokia 9300 smart phone because it called to mind my early experience almost a decade ago using the phone’s predecessor, the original 9000 Communicator. The 9000 was bulky and many the lining of a good suit was mutilated by what by aghast friends would term “the brick”.

Think of the 9000 Communicator but in a slimmed-down form and you have the Nokia 9300. The term Communicator is gone, replaced by smart phone, because that effectively is what it is: a very smart phone, both from a fashion and productivity perspective.

In scaling down the phone, the keyboard has been reduced to a point where you would only use it to draft very short emails or text messages; I would admire the patience and perseverance of an individual trying to write a novel on this device. In the era of the rival BlackBerry, however, the Nokia 9300 is out on its own because it truly gives you the look and feel of a PC. For executives on the move, the device has a beautiful colour screen with perfect resolution for surfing the web and even reading Adobe Acrobat documents.

To navigate your way around the 9300, on top of the keyboard is a panel of hotkeys such as telephone, messaging, web and contacts, for example, but you can also navigate the device either as you would a standard mobile phone when it is closed or by a kind of mouse/toggle. The comparison of these devices to the PC is no accident. These devices are getting more powerful and effectively have most of the utilities you take for granted on your PC. Surfing the internet on the 9300 is an enjoyable experience, the 65,536-colour screen portrays webpages picture perfect. However, the mouse takes a bit of getting used to.

The 9300 boasts considerable memory storage for a mobile device with some 80MB of built-in memory plus an additional multimedia card. Mobile internet and data connectivity is conducted using EDGE technology. The Nokia 9300 can take email with attachments and boasts office applications such as word processor, spreadsheet and presentations. The device is also triband and can work across five different continents.

All in all the Nokia 9300 is a slim, sleek, stylish yet extremely functional piece of technology that made any reservations I had about smart phones vanish fairly rapidly. The 9300 is available in Ireland from O2 and Vodafone for €499 on contract and €699 SIM-free.

By John Kennedy